Fate of the World is a new strategy game for PC which puts the future of the world in your hands. Starting off in the year 2020, when natural disasters due to climate change start to hit, you, as a newly appointed leader have been given the arduous task to deal with this extreme situation by using your strategic skills.

Fate of the World Screenshot

In game features include:

Achievements

Combines latest science with challenging game play

Save the world, or destroy it!

Challenging regional missions for you to complete, and global sandbox.

Guide 12 world regions

Shape the next 200 years and see your decisions unfold on a realistic Earth

Fate of the World is being made by the team behind the Red Redemption series and the producer of Battlestations: Midway, Klaude Thomas – the climate science in the game is being taken care of by Dr Myles Allen (University of Oxford).

A social bookmarking site allows the user to store lists of Internet resources that they may find useful. This might sound similar to the Favourites/Bookmarks available through your web browser. The difference is that such lists may be available through any Internet connected PC. Also these lists may be set as accessible either to the public or to a specific group, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

There are a number of ways in which social bookmarking can be useful in teaching and learning. Educational usage examples include;

Student groups can set up a network to share resources they find over a period of working on a joint project.

Teachers can share their bookmarks with students

Individual students can share their resources with their class mates.

Two social bookmarking tools which have been gaining popularity in recent years are Diigo and Delicious.

Version 7.0.517.41 of Chrome for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux has just been released. This fixes a serious bug which causes the popular web browser to crash when an autfill form is used. A number of features have also been added, including updated HTML5 support.

Unfortunately one of the most wanted functions by the users is still missing, namely ‘print preview’.

Google have confirmed that this is indeed in the top ten of the requested features, but the company has been unable to add it since two years of the browser’s release.

Some of the obstacles that keep educators back from giving a web search task to their students may be:

Time management

Unless guided, students may find it hard to search and find links relevant to the assignment. Searching on Google gives a LOT of results but only a few may be helpful.

Whitelist

Some of the searches may result in links which are not on the Schoolnet whitelist, in which case students will get the “category: none” error, stopping them from viewing the desired website.

Internet safety

It is very important for teachers to ensure that their students are protected when using the internet, especially when a guardian is not with them while browsing at home.

SymbalooEDU is a free service which educators can use to easily create (and share) links and categories, called ‘webmix’. Once registered, a teacher creates links/categories in a number of blocks (see screenshot below).

SymbalooEDU webmix: displayed as a series of clickable blocks

These blocks may be direct links to other websites, or a link to a category such as a subject, for example – ‘Geography’, which would then take the user to a link with a list of relevant websites, or even, sub-categories. This will ensure that students have a number of websites available to search from so time is not lost – and this is done in a internet-safe way while ensuring that all links will work. With SymbalooEDU, educators can also share their links between them – for example subject co-coordinators can create a webmix and then make it available to subject teachers to use in their class.

Summing up, SymbalooEDU is a very valid free online tool, straightforward to use and gives immediate benefits.

After a twenty year absence from the videogame console market, Panasonic have unveiled their upcoming device - ‘Jungle’ which features a rugged look and houses a single largish screen, a full QWERTY keyboard as well as two control knobs. Information is very sparse at the moment, but it seems that device is targeted at the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) crowd, which is quite big in the Asian region. Price is rumoured to be around the USD400 (€290) mark, which is not exactly cheap.

With competition such as the Nintendo DS family and PSP, it is really a jungle out there.

At the moment it is unknown if the Jungle will feature an open source operating system, making the creating of software and applications by the end user possible. More news as we have it, meanwhile you can view the teaser site about this device Panasonic have put up here.